Sean Wheeler of Loveland certainly would have the right to be a bitter man seeking to punish those like the ones who wronged him.

When he was a boy, he was routinely snatched away in his small Midwestern town and sexually abused by a group of men. It sounds horrific, to the point where bad horror movies are written with similar plots, and yet this was Wheeler’s life as a boy.

Who could blame him if he wanted to tell his story to ensure sex offenders were punished to the fullest extent of the law?

Instead, he tells his story to help them.

“My every wound is becoming a weapon to help other people,” he said.

He works with a prison ministry to share his story with sex offenders recently released on parole. The program’s goal is to help offenders who are trying to start a new life outside prison.

We as a society are hard on those people. We force them to register for inclusion on a lifetime list, ensuring they are pariahs. We honestly get why people would want them on that list. It’s a hard crime to forgive.

And yet, that doesn’t help them become members of society, let alone valuable ones, and that’s the hardest thing for those released from prison to achieve. You could argue the way sex offenders are treated may lead them to offend again.

But here’s a guy who is not a preacher, just a regular guy with a strong faith in God, who has decided to forgive and help others who have trespassed in a bad way against him.